Sculptural Exhibition Space Promotes Local Designers

Was published in Jakarta Post on Sunday November 4, 2007

In the last few years, the discourse of exporting our intellectual commodities has been emerging within the design community. Globalization provided a whole new playground for local designers where global competition is inevitable.

At this moment, the Indonesian creative industry is still struggling for international recognition -- specifically in architecture design, where traditional style is still dominating the international perspective on Indonesian design. To some contemporary architect, this view represents inferiority of Indonesian creative industry and provides weak ground for local designers to compete globally.

However, the Indonesian Trade Show which was held from October 23rd to October 27th, 2007 at the Jakarta Fairground in Kemayoran provide a whole different approach to presenting Indonesian creative products, as well as exhibition design to the public. The trade show was packaged in an unconventional manner.

Traditionally, in a lot of commercial exhibitions in Indonesia, every exhibition booth competes to be distinct by showing unique and attractive design. Each booth is confined in a fixed module and designed specifically to sell each products. In a whole, the entire exhibition would look more like a circus than a market place.

Andra Matin took a whole new design approach. Recognized as one of the 101 of the world's most exciting new architects by the Wallpaper* magazine, Andra Matin gave a much richer spatial experience to the whole show, comparable to a modern art museum. The exhibition took place in the recently built D2 hall at the Jakarta Fairground complex.

By occupying a very large, hangar-like space, Andra had the opportunity of creating a three-story interior structure. He maintains the quality of the great hall by not totally enclosing it with the additional floor spaces. The created space is more sculptural than commercial.

Entering the exhibition space, he guided the visitor to ascend through a long and tapered stepped corridor to reach the top floor as the beginning of the whole experience. From that point, the visitor would gradually descend through the exhibition.

Circulation flow is designed not only to allow visitor to view the exhibition in a continuous way but also reveal the space beneath, so the visitors would get a glimpse of the overall show while experiencing the show.

The predominantly black interior with black fabric covering the hall's interior side, provided a more focused environment for the trade products. Each product is exhibited without further set up, some of them even just placed their products on the floor. Personally, each item appeared more like an art object than a commercial product.

I believe in order to encourage our local creative commodities, we need a more permanent exhibition space similar to the trade show exhibition space or even like the Cooper Hewitt's National Design Museum in New York, USA.

Andra Matin's skillful space manipulation shows us that the creative industry needs to receive higher appreciation. In fact, all the products exhibited in the show have already received international appreciation, but are still lacking in local recognition -- an interesting phenomena that challenges our foreign brand oriented society.

Caption 1: he visitors ascend through a long and tapered stepped corridor to reach the top floor as the beginning of the whole experience.

Caption 2:Circulation flow is designed not only to allow visitor to view the exhibition in a continuous flow but also reveal the space beneath.

Caption 3: The predominantly black interior provides a more focused environment for the trade products

Caption 4: Each product appears more like an art object than a commercial product.

All images are by Zenin Adrian